Battle Stations

As Margaret Thatcher in old age—confined to her home and afflicted with dementia—Meryl Streep turns senescence into poetry. Apart from the great Lear interpreters, Streep, in “The Iron Lady,” has given us the best impression we’ve had of a potentate suffering from loss of power and fear of madness. The anxiety of forgetfulness crosses her brow in a flutter; she hesitates before speaking, and then, gathering her breath, pulls an imperative out of the cobwebs. Her eyes, darting around corners, tell us that Thatcher is still alert to any challenge to her authority. Despite Streep’s eloquence and wit, however, “The Iron Lady” is seriously misconceived. It would be hard, no doubt, for any team of British filmmakers to deal with a figure as masterful, virulent, and divisive as Thatcher, but this bio-pic, written by Abi Morgan and directed by Phyllida Lloyd, is an oddly unsettled compound of glorification and malice. It whirls around restlessly and winds up nowhere. The movie is framed by—and a good forty per cent of it is taken up with—Thatcher meandering from one thing to another in her house, watching family videos, talking to her husband, Denis (Jim Broadbent), who has been dead for eight years. She is unable to sort out reality from hallucination, past from present, necessary tasks from unnecessary. Thatcher, the only woman to become Prime Minister of Britain, is a battler who changed the country’s economy and its culture. She may have been wrong, and personally dislikable, even insufferable, but why undermine her in this way?

In part, the movie celebrates, in brief flashbacks, what was remarkable about Margaret Roberts, the daughter of a Lincolnshire grocer, who entered politics at twenty-four and faced down withering gender and class prejudice from the local Tory nabobs. Alexandra Roach, the actress who plays young Margaret, has a slight overbite and staring blue eyes that suggest an unnerving singleness of purpose. Even as Margaret accepts a marriage proposal from the charming Denis (Harry Lloyd), she’s strenuous and awkward—but also intelligent and forthright. In the nineteen-seventies, she becomes a minister in the Cabinet of Edward Heath, and Streep takes over, turning Thatcher into a ruthless scourge of what she believes to be Conservative weakness. When she runs for Party leader, she allows her hair to be teased into a lofty blond arc, a sort of cotton-candy diadem. Her speech, with training, gets heavier and slower, the emphasis landing on selected, morally instructive syllables like a hammer hitting an anvil. The movie might have been titled “The Iron Voice.” The clangorous insistence of it drives you crazy. Over and over, she says the same things: privatize industry, bust the trade unions, take responsibility for yourself. The filmmakers substitute personal assertion for politics, as if Thatcher’s voice itself had altered the behavior of millions. It’s impossible to tell how much of what she says is an accurate reading of the state of affairs and how much of it mere ideology—or how effective any of it was. Did her policies lead to the economic resurgence of the eighties? (No mention is made of North Sea oil.) In a particularly confused bit of sequencing, the filmmakers make it seem that Britain’s enormous economic growth spurt was brought about by victory in the Falklands War, in 1982. How?

Morgan and Lloyd appear to object to everything about Thatcher except her early determination to stand up to men. But gumption turned into contempt, and it would have been interesting to see the stages. The directorial flourishes illustrating Thatcher’s predominance come off as glibly sarcastic: the male ministers are shot from her point of view, circling around her and then backing away like livestock, or running after her, musical-comedy style, as she rushes through the halls of Parliament. Near the end, Streep, pressing even harder, underlines Thatcher’s pleasure in humiliating her Cabinet. It’s a tough, honest performance, yet Streep has lent herself to a project of revenge against the character she plays. When Margaret accepts Denis’s proposal, she swears that she will not end her life washing a teacup. At the conclusion of the movie, she is standing at a sink, doing exactly that. This may pass for irony, but it’s an impoverished and low-minded irony. Most of us will end up washing cups. But Margaret Thatcher smashed a lot of china before her piteous final chapter.

In Steven Spielberg’s “War Horse,” the British cavalry, swords drawn, charges out of a hayfield at daybreak, gallops across an open plain, and overruns a German field camp. It is 1914, in Quiévrechain, France, near the Belgian border. As Spielberg cuts back and forth between the armed British and the terrified Germans, we realize that he’s re-created a famous scene, of Arab legions streaming into a Turkish encampment, from his favorite movie, “Lawrence of Arabia.” But then triumph changes to something else—to the horror of a modern “Charge of the Light Brigade.” German machine guns are waiting in the woods just behind the camp, and most of the cavalry, including the horses, gets cut down. The sequence mixes vainglory and tragedy, and it makes us think that Spielberg could have made a great First World War movie. “War Horse” has epic scenes of armies marching through damp woods and fighting in mucky trenches, yet it’s essentially an animal story, or, to be more precise, a boy-meets-horse story.

In paradisal green Devon, a clean-limbed English youth, Albert (Jeremy Irvine), raises a bay colt he calls Joey. When his father sells Joey to a British officer, Albert enlists and searches for the horse in the slaughterhouse of France. The movie is a series of pictorially splendid set pieces, interlarded with broad rural and army comedy. Apart from the battle scenes, much of “War Horse” has the feeling of nineteen-fifties family entertainment—it’s leisurely, hearty, sentimental, overexplicit. There are village rowdies and plainspoken women. There is a troublesome goose that nips at men’s trousers. German soldiers as well as British try to protect Joey. We get the point: the concern for a wonderful animal partly redeems the carnage. But that idea is weakened by a huge, literal-minded production.

“War Horse” began life as Michael Morpurgo’s young-adult novel, written from the point of view of the horse, who turns out to have complex feelings and a decent prose style. From there, it became a startling and powerful spectacle mounted by the National Theatre of Great Britain, the production now being staged at Lincoln Center. Onstage, each horse is a large puppet, a concatenation of cane, silk, cables, and gears, worked by two men beneath the frame and one at the side, operating the head and the neck. The audience becomes entranced precisely by the means of making the spectacle, an absorption that, aided by menacing sound and flashing light, focusses attention on the devastation of war and, by contrast, the horsiness of a horse—the rearing, twitching, and nuzzling through which its nobility and affection pour out.

The purity of intention behind the artifice is intensely moving. We never think to ask why a nineteen-year-old boy is so obsessed with a horse, or why the entire production is devoted to an animal, while ten million men are dying all around him. But when Spielberg does the story realistically, with scenes of butchery and mud, it seems trivial, even a little daft: the war stops, the armies and the trenches and the hospitals are stilled, so that the boy and the animal can find each other. The horses themselves are magnificent, and maybe that’s reason enough to see the movie. But “War Horse” is a bland, bizarrely unimaginative piece of work.

“Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol” tries to out-Bond the Bonds and out-Bourne the Bournes. The movie is sheer hurtling mechanism—the entire world in motion—and it’s great silly fun. Brad Bird, who directed the Pixar classics “The Incredibles” and “Ratatouille,” has gone live-action for the first time. Working with the renowned cinematographer Robert Elswit, Bird pushes his cast through as many preposterous scrapes as possible, and, at times, he attains the freedom of animation with real flesh and crashing metal. He seems particularly obsessed with falling, or the fear of falling: Tom Cruise scales the world’s tallest building (the spindly Burj Khalifa, in Dubai), gripping with electronic gecko gloves, one of which appears to have a dying battery. Cruise runs a lot, which is just as well, since he’s now so tensed and will-driven as an actor that no one can write a real part for him. The plot is trivial: the world is in danger of being destroyed by a “nuclear extremist” (as opposed to a “nuclear moderate”?). Cruise has to stop him. See the movie on an IMAX screen, if you can—the induced vertigo is exciting, though you may feel that you’re holding your stomach in your hands. ♦

David Denby has been a staff writer and film critic at The New Yorker since 1998.